| James Carroll | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 22, 1943 Chicago, Illinois United States |
| Occupation | Former Catholic Priest, Novelist, Journalist |
| Nationality | American |
| Genres | Fiction, History, Religion and Politics |
| Spouse(s) | Alexandra Marshall |
| Children | 2 |
James Carroll (born 22 January 1943 in Chicago, Illinois) is a noted author, historian and journalist and Roman Catholic dissident.
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Carroll was born in Chicago, the second of five sons of late Air Force General Joseph Carroll, and his wife Mary. At the time, his father was a Special Agent of the FBI, which he remained until being seconded to, and later commissioned by, the US Air Force as an Intelligence Officer in 1948. After this, Carroll was raised in the Washington, D.C. area and in Germany. He was educated at Washington’s Priory School and at an American high school, the H. H. Arnold, in Wiesbaden, Germany[1] He attended Georgetown University before entering St. Paul’s College, the Paulist Fathers’ seminary, where he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees.
He was ordained to the priesthood in 1969. Carroll served as Catholic chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974. During that time, he studied poetry with George Starbuck and published books on religious subjects and a book of poems. He was also a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter (1972–1975) and was named Best Columnist by the Catholic Press Association. For his writing on religion and politics he received the first Thomas Merton Award from Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center in 1972. Carroll left the priesthood in 1974 to become a writer, and, in the same year, was a playwright-in-residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival.
Carroll’s plays have been produced at the Berkshire Theater Festival and at Boston’s Next Move Theater. In 1976 he published his first novel, Madonna Red, which was followed by nine others. He has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, and his op-ed column appears weekly in the Boston Globe. He won the 1996 National Book Award for nonfiction for An American Requiem, a memoir of his relationships with his father, the American military, and the Catholic Church.
He is the author of other books on religion and politics, including House of War, which won the first PEN-Galbraith Award. Mr. Carroll's other works include the novels Secret Father, The City Below, Memorial Bridge, Prince of Peace, Mortal Friends, and Madonna Red, in addition to various plays and Forbidden Disappointments, a book of poetry published in 1974. Carroll's work has received the Melcher Book Award, the James Parks Morton Interfaith Award, and National Jewish Book Award in History, and has been frequently been named among the Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times.
Carroll has been a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School. He is a trustee of the Boston Public Library, a member of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University, and a member of the Dean’s Council at the Harvard Divinity School. Carroll is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the Academy’s Committee on International Security Studies. He worked on his 2006 history of the Pentagon, House of War, as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Academy. Carroll is also a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University, where he wrote his latest book, Practicing Catholic, published in 2009.
Carroll wrote history of Christian, specifically Roman Catholic, anti-Semitism and treatment of Jews, titled Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (2001). In this work, he connects many personal experiences, especially his boyhood trips to Catholic pilgrimage sites in Rhineland Germany, and as a seminarian and priest, to the places and events that he analyzes. The book was a New York Times Best-Seller, although it got mixed reviews as some saw it as demonizing the Church and Constantine I, the first Christian emperor of Rome. The book also earned Carroll his second National Book Award as well as several accolades from national newspapers, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Carroll co-wrote and presented the 2007 documentary Constantine's Sword with filmmaker Oren Jacoby.
In a 2009 book, he denounced Pope Benedict XVI as “the chief sponsor of the new Catholic fundamentalism, enforced with no regard for the real cost to human beings”.[2]
In The Myth of Hitler's Pope, rabbi David G. Dalin, professor at the Roman Catholic Ave Maria University:
Carroll is married to the novelist Alexandra Marshall. They have two grown children.